A communication device or a User Equipment (UE) such as a mobile phone may be able to be in communication with other user devices through the cellular network of an operator with which the user of the device has an account. A variety of different types of services may be offered by the operator to the user, including services that permit a messaging service message, e.g., Short Message Service (SMS), Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), and Rich Communication Suite (RCS) service to be transmitted to/from the device through the operator's mobile network.
RCS is a developed service-type that can be used in the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) domain which uses the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) as signaling protocol. RCS permits users to query device capabilities and/or application-level multimedia capabilities from their contacts, such that a user device can upgrade a communication from plain text SMS to enable “rich communication”, such as Voice over LTE (VoLTE), video calls, Instant Messaging (IM), file or image sharing, etc., based on the real-time capabilities of the contacts. RCS also offers a delivery channel for businesses to communicate with their staff, existing and potential customer base, Machine-to-Machine (M2M) applications and Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications.
In order for a UE to use RCS services, the UE needs a RCS client on the device. The user is asked to accept or reject the use of RCS, this is for using the RCS application as such. SMS does not require an access/reject by the user whereas iMessage is enabled automatically and transparently to the user out of the box. RCS is made available to the user via manual software upgrade or upgraded via Over-The-Air (OTA).
A problem with those messaging applications is that whatever is sent to the user, the messages are received. This might not be a problem for Person-to-Person (P2P) communication but with the increased use of, e.g., RCS business messaging that employs Application-to-Person (A2P) communication services, this might be an issue. The same applies for IMS/SIP messaging employing A2P services or to any other messaging application employing A2P services. It is therefore important that the user can control what type of messages or information to receive and also control the content of messages to the proper level.